Some environmentalists back nuclear power

Stewart Brand, an architect of the environmental movement featured in a new documentary, now endorses nuclear energy.

Stewart Brand, an architect of the environmental movement featured in a new documentary, now endorses nuclear energy.

Photo: Robert Stone, CNN Films

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Wires from an electrical utility clutter a Brazilian slum in "Pandora's Promise," a documentary in which environmental leaders offer optimistic views on the promise of nuclear energy.

Wires from an electrical utility clutter a Brazilian slum in "Pandora's Promise," a documentary in which environmental leaders offer optimistic views on the promise of nuclear energy.

Photo: Robert Stone, CNN Films

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Stewart Brand says he believes the film could reach liberal and moderate viewers because of its emphasis on science.

Stewart Brand says he believes the film could reach liberal and moderate viewers because of its emphasis on science.

Photo: Howard Shack, CNN Films

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The brightly lit streets of Tokyo in a scene from PANDORA'S PROMISE. Photo: Robert Stone

The brightly lit streets of Tokyo in a scene from PANDORA'S PROMISE. Photo: Robert Stone

Photo: Robert Stone, CNN Films

Some environmentalists back nuclear power

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Stewart Brand helped shape the modern environmental movement and the way the world interacts online. But the influential, 74-year-old Sausalito resident and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog has been standing apart from his fellow greenies on one issue: He supports nuclear power.

"Nuclear is green," Brand said during a recent interview, "not evil."

Green in that it is virtually carbon-free. To Brand, nuclear is a solution to the climate crisis brought on by the burning of fossil fuels. It is a power source that's delivering 19 percent of the U.S. energy supply while solar provides less than 1 percent. In France, as Brand often points out, nuclear plants are generating 80 percent of the country's power.

On Friday, the issue will get a national airing with the release of "Pandora's Promise," a new film co-produced by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It stars top environmentalists, including several Bay Area thought leaders like Brand, who explain how they saw beyond the mushroom cloud and changed their mind about the power of nuclear fission.

Storing the waste

While "Pandora's Promise" doesn't have the star power of "An Inconvenient Truth," the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about former Vice President Al Gore's campaign to curb climate change, the film will open in 25 theaters nationwide, compared with four for the Gore film's opening day.

More important, Brand believes the documentary could reach liberal and moderate antinuclear viewers because it explores the science-driven epiphanies of a handful of people with similar worldviews.

Brand's epiphany began 13 years ago, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which was ticketed to be a nuclear waste depository until the federal government killed the project in 2009. While Brand was there to tour the region, not think about waste, he said he "started to think that something is really seriously screwy here."

"It doesn't make sense in terms of the actual amounts of radiation in the waste. I discovered that we're already doing nuclear waste storage very successfully in New Mexico. It's just fine there. It would have been just fine in Yucca Mountain. It's just fine in France," he said.

For years, he opposed nuclear energy because "it looked like handing off" the problem of nuclear waste "to many generations in the future, and that seemed like poor civilizational behavior." But he changed his view.

He foresees a future where smaller reactors are plopped safely into the ground and used to power small cities. Going small could address the question of cost.

"Pandora" is an advocacy piece, but its tone is leavened with science aimed at what Brand calls "a narrative about nuclear that kind of sealed itself off from actual evidence. And it's a narrative that involves the vileness of nuclear weapons - which is right. And then it gets mixed up with notions about corporations being the root of all evil."

"Unfortunately," Brand said, "one of the side effects of the modern environmental movement coming out of a certain time in the 1960s is that it developed a left-liberal political agenda and framing that views anything coming from corporations as automatically suspect or worse," Brand said.

Being pro-nuclear has been forbidden among liberals since Baby Boomers were taught to duck and cover a half-century ago. More recently, Generation Xers were horrified by the 1983 TV movie "The Day After," about the fictional aftermath of a nuclear blast on a small town in Kansas.

The conversation-ending questions remain: What about the radiation? Where do you put the waste? What if terrorists attack a plant? Where do we get the billions to build a facility?

Difficult timing

In many ways, this isn't a good cultural moment for Americans to rethink nuclear power.

The hope of a "nuclear spring" - a blooming of nuclear sites - took another hit last week when Southern California Edison said it was permanently shutting down the 2,150-megawatt San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on the Orange County coast.

In recent months, plant operators in Wisconsin and Florida have announced closures, and still fresh is the 2011 disaster in Fukushima, Japan, when a powerful earthquake and a tsunami caused a meltdown of three reactors on the Pacific coast.

Writer and leading international climate change activist Bill McKibben said that nuclear power is not likely to play a major role after that disaster. "Even before Fukushima, I thought cost was the real obstacle, along with the obvious issues," he added.

But President Obama supports nuclear power, as does Steven Chu, his Nobel Prize-winning former energy secretary who was a Stanford professor. In March, Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology told him that "achieving low-carbon goals without a substantial contribution from nuclear power is possible, but extremely difficult."

Another prominent voice in the film is Richard Rhodes of Half Moon Bay, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" who initially "had the usual knee-jerk journalist's reaction to nuclear power," he said. "That it was a joke and a danger."

But Rhodes' epiphany occurred when he was interviewing scientists for his book "and their position was so shockingly different than the perceived wisdom was in this country at the time," Rhodes said.

'Zero-carbon technology'

Michael Shellenberger, who is also featured in the film, is lifelong environmentalist whose views on nuclear power were changed during a visit with Brand several years ago.

At first, he was dubious. But as the co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland think tank, he and partner Ted Nordhaus began to wonder what sort of affordable, carbon-free energy source could power a fast-growing world population.

"We do have a zero-carbon technology that can scale, that can be cheap, that can save the world," Shellenberger said. "And it would be bad for us not to say that."

But Shellenberger, 41, acknowledged that it will be difficult to change the mind of Baby Boomers. "We don't even have that as a priority to change their minds," he said. "I'd like to get the next generation of environmentalists."